exploitation

I’ve always found Zack Snyder a sort of conundrum of a filmmaker. At his worst, he’s like a rich man’s Michael Bay – perhaps the best fit out there for making the overblown, stupid films that Hollywood loves to produce; but at his best, he can come close to transcending from the mindless glut of his violent action films and create truly exciting cinema.

So the prospect of Snyder’s Sucker Punch, his first film that’s based on an original idea of his own, definitely had me interested. Would we finally get inside of his head to find a pure nugget of super-violent brilliance? My hopes were only raised when I heard the plot for the movie – five doll-faced 20-something women have to escape an insane asylum by make-believing the most absurd cinematic scenarios imaginable.

It was clear: Sucker Punch would be either a grand reimagining of the exploitation genre with a tentpole budget, or the worst headache ever.

Hollywood’s gotten a little ironic as of late. With throwbacks to the cheese of yesteryear – The Expendibles, Piranha 3D and Predators, just in the past two months – the studios have been willing to play with low-brow entertainment while winking at the audience. But like Snakes on a Plane proved, making a bad movie good isn’t as easy as it seems, and those aforementioned aforementioned movies worked to varying degrees (godsend Piranha 3D aside).

So how does Machete, a movie with the unpublicized catchphrase “You just fucked with the wrong Mexican,” fulfill fanboy dreams of silly cinema? Pretty well, it turns out.[click to continue…]